AT LEAST the bath water was hot, and the towels
Maria had brought for her, bustling importantly into
the bedroom on a stream of incomprehensible Italian
whilst she inspected Jodie with her sharp gaze, were
deliciously soft and thick.
As in the bedroom, the decor in her en suite bathroom
was very plain, but there was no mistaking the
quality of the sanitaryware or the cool smartness of
the marble covering the floor and walls.
Wrapped in one of the towels, Jodie padded barefoot
back to her bedroom and opened her case,
quickly searching through it for the nightshirt she
knew she had packed. But when she lifted her neatly
packed tops out of the case she started to frown. Her
nightshirt was there, all right, but so also was the
deliciously frivolous new underwear she had bought
for her honeymoon: bras and short knickers in floral
patterns; silk thongs that fastened with satin bows; a
sheer floral mini-slip that was so pretty she hadn’t
been able to resist it; even the cream lace and satin
basque she had bought on a sudden impulse one
lunchtime after yet another evening spent with John
refusing to do anything more than indulge in gentle
"petting".
She hadn’t known then, of course, that the reason
he had not taken their intimacy to its logical conclusion
had not been because he had loved her so much,
but because he had loved her so little. Now, thanks
to Louise, she knew that all the time she had been
aching for him and admiring his restraint he had secretly
been turned off by her.
What on earth was this stuff doing in her case? She
found the answer in a small note from her cousin-inlaw,
tucked in between the folds of her nightshirt.
It seemed such a pity not to take these with you.
You never know, you might meet someone who will
appreciate them — and you.
Jodie almost laughed out loud. Andrea had had
more of a presentiment than even she could have
guessed! As a bride-to-be, she ought to be able to find
a use for such frivolous items, but she knew that
Lorenzo would be even less appreciative of both them
and her than John had been.
She pulled on her nightgown and closed the case,
placing it on the floor before crawling into the middle
of the huge bed and switching off the light.
By rights she ought to be thinking about the situation
she had put herself into and working out how
best to extricate herself from it, but she was far, far
too tired.
Lorenzo shut down his computer and got up from the
desk where he had been working. He had e-mailed
several people: his lawyer, explaining to him his
plans — or at least as much of them as he wanted him
to know; a certain very highly placed diplomat who
owed him several favours, requesting his help in cutting
through the normal procedures so that he could
marry his British fiance.e as quickly as possible; and
the Cardinal, who was his second cousin once re-
moved. Fortuitously he already had in his possession
Jodie’s passport, having found it in the wallet of
travel documents she had left on the passenger seat
of her car, and he had faxed its details to all three
men. His instructions to his lawyer were that he
should draw up a marriage agreement with the utmost
haste, and at the same time to make arrangements for
the sole ownership of the Castillo to be transferred to
Lorenzo, in accordance with the terms of his grandmother’s
will.
He then left his apartments and headed downstairs,
striding through the warren of unused rooms with
their old-fashioned furnishings and musty air until he
reached the door he wanted. Already the tension was
building inside him, and along with it the excitement;
already his senses were anticipating the pleasure that
lay ahead of him. He would marry a dozen pale-faced,
too-thin English women if necessary, in order to satisfy
the desire that had driven him for so long.
The cramping pain seizing her leg muscles was savage
and unrelenting, wrenching Jodie out of her deep
sleep with a sharp cry of pain.
Lorenzo heard it as he walked out of his bathroom,
his forehead pleating into a frown when it was repeated.
Securing his towel round his hips, he strode
towards the guest room, thrusting open the door and
switching on the light.
Jodie was lying in the middle of the bed, desperately
trying to massage the pain out of her locked
muscles.
Lorenzo recognised immediately what was happening.
Going over to the bed, he took hold of her by
her shoulders, demanding curtly, "What is it? Cramp?"
Jodie nodded her head, and managed to gasp painfully,
"Yes. In my leg…"
The intensity of the pain had turned her face bonegrey,
and Lorenzo could see the small beads of perspiration
forming on her forehead.
"Do you suffer like this often?"
Why was he asking her that? Was he afraid of saddling
himself with a wife who would be a liability
even if she was only a twelve-month wife?
"No, only when I get overtired — oh!" Jodie winced
and cried out as his strong fingers found the exact
spot on her leg where the pain was bunched.
"Lie still," Lorenzo instructed her. "It’s all right."
He added, when she looked warily at him, "I do know
what I’m doing."
Jodie would have continued to resist if a second
bout of cramp hadn’t seized her, leaving her with no
energy to do anything other than focus on coping with
the searing pain. Lorenzo cursed out loud and then
lifted her up, ignoring her protests as he turned her
over and placed her back on the bed.
Now, with her legs exposed by the ridiculously infantile
elongated tee shirt she was wearing, he could
see that he had been right about their length, and that
she had not been wearing heels. He could also see
that one of her legs was slightly more slender than
the other, and that on the inside of its knee there was
a delicate silver tracery of scars.
With the cramp continuing its brutal assault on her,
Jodie wasn’t even aware that she was digging her fingers
into Lorenzo’s arm as she willed herself not to
cry out. This was the worst she could ever remember
it being.
Lorenzo waited until her grip had started to relax
before releasing himself and going quickly to work,
his long, lean fingers probing the knot of locked muscle
until Jodie wanted to scream in agony. She tried
to drag her leg free of his fingers, but then slowly,
blissfully, they started to take away the pain, kneading
and stroking until the muscle began to relax. A tiny
quiver jerked through her muscle and automatically
she clenched it, waiting for a fresh onslaught, her
whole body shaking.
"Relax…" Lorenzo was still massaging her leg, but
now the long, firm strokes of his hands were moving
upwards, and the tension that was gripping her as she
felt his fingers brushing against the hem of her nightshirt
was caused by the cramping sensation in her
stomach, not her leg. And it had nothing whatsoever
to do with over-tiredness.
"To judge from these scars you must have had several
operations?"
Jodie tensed again. She wanted to pull her leg
away, but she was afraid to move in case in doing so
she caused the hem of her nightshirt to ride even
higher. It was too late now to wish she had put on
some underwear as well as the nightshirt.
"Yes," she said briefly.
"How many?"
She exhaled. "Does it matter? It isn’t as if You’re
going to be left having to look after me if I end up
in a wheelchair or anything, is it?"
"Is that a possibility?" He was still massaging her
leg, but now his fingers were slowly stroking over the
tight scar tissue itself. For some odd reason Jodie discovered
that she badly wanted to cry. No one had ever
touched her scars with anything other than clinical
detachment. The long months in hospital had inured
her to physical examinations, to doctors discussing
her as though she were a piece of broken equipment
they were trying to piece together again and put in
working order. Which, of course, to them, was exactly
what she had been. She was grateful to them for everything
they had done for her — how could she not
be? — but at the same time…
At the same time what? Secretly, she had craved a
more personal touch, a comforting, knowing touch
that neither flinched from her scars nor made a dramatic
fuss about them.
But not a touch that made her feel the way
Lorenzo’s touch was making her feel!
"No. My leg is always going to be weak, but it has
healed properly now," she blurted out, then bit her lip,
not wanting to remember those horrifying days when
the doctors had feared they might have to amputate.
"Thank you. You can stop now. The cramp has gone,"
she told him as she forced herself to concentrate on
something — anything — other than on the smooth gliding
stroke of his fingers against her skin. No lover
could have… No lover? Now what was she thinking?
She rolled over so that she could face him, all too
conscious of the warm weight of his hand where it
still lay across her bare thigh, her eyes widening as
she took in what she hadn’t realised before: namely
that all he was wearing was a towel, wrapped low on
his hips, and that the body it revealed was enough to
make any right-thinking woman go weak with female
appreciation. But from now on she was not going to
allow herself to want any man, she reminded herself
fiercely, and certainly not a man like this one. Every
instinct she possessed told her he was far too dangerous.
He was an autocratic alpha male who was
determined to get what he wanted, no matter who he
had to use in order to do so, and it was that she ought
to be concentrating her attention on — not the taut
muscles of his flat belly, or the distracting maleness
of the body hair that arrowed downwards to where
his towel had slipped slightly to reveal where it began
thickening out. Jodie touched her tongue-tip to her
lips and sucked in a shaky gulp of air.
Lorenzo removed his hand from her thigh and
straightened, pausing in the act of resecuring his towel
to watch as Jodie focused on the movement of his
hands, her breathing accelerating.
"If you keep on looking at me like that," he began
in a warning tone, "I’m going to think—"
"What do you mean?" Jodie protested, her face
burning.
"You were looking at me like a girl looking at her
first man," Lorenzo said mockingly. "Which leads me
to wonder what kind of woman you are that you look
at me like that — and what kind of man this ex-fiance.
of yours was to give you that need."
"I wasn’t looking at you like anything," Jodie argued
frantically. "You’re imagining it. No modern
woman needs to wonder what a man"s body looks
like."
"So it wouldn’t bother you, then, if I weren’t wearing
this?" Lorenzo suggested, his fingers resting
against the top of his towel.
Jodie made a valiant attempt at a small nonchalant
shrug. "No — why should it? One naked male body is
much like any other."
"Was your ex-fiance. circumcised?"
Jodie opened her mouth and then closed it again,
her face slowly turning a deep shade of pink whilst
her heart skidded and bounced around inside her chest
cavity as though seeking the same invisible escape
route as her thoughts. Was he asking her that because
he had guessed that she simply didn’t know? Because
he wanted to humiliate her by making her admit how
limited her sexual experience really was?
"Er…why do you ask?"
"Why Don’t you answer?"
"I’m not questioning you about your past sex life.
And if we"re going to get married—"
"If? There is no if about it. I’ve already contacted
my lawyer. He"ll be here in the morning."
"It will take quite a long time to go through all the
legal formalities, I expect."
"Not for us. Once we have seen Alfredo we shall
be leaving for Florence."
"Florence?"
"I have some business to attend to there, and you
will want to buy a wedding outfit."
"A wedding outfit?"
The dark eyebrows lifted. "I take it that you didn’t
bring your bridal gown with you when you ran
away?"
Jodie looked away from him. "No, I didn’t," she
agreed quietly. Her wedding dress was still hanging
up in the shop where she had bought it, paid for but
never collected.
Lorenzo watched her impassively. "There are any
number of designer shops in Florence. You are bound
to find something in one of them."
Designer shops? Finding something would be the
easy bit, Jodie reflected; paying for it at designer shop
prices with her limited budget would be the hard part.
She moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue.
"What if…? What if I’ve changed my mind?"
"I shan’t let you."
"But you can’t stop me."
The way he was looking at her brought it home to
her that she was trapped here in this ancient stronghold,
where no doubt his ancestors had once held their
prisoners captive in the depths of its dank dungeons.
"What is it exactly that you are so afraid of?" he
asked.
"I’m not afraid of anything — or anyone," Jodie lied.
"So there is no reason why we should not be married,
then, is there? It is an arrangement from which
we both stand to gain something of importance to us.
When is this ex-fiance. of yours to marry?"
"The middle of next month."
"Bene. We will be married ourselves by then, so
you will have the pleasure of introducing me to him
as your husband. Now, it is late, and tomorrow there
is much to be done."
"Why Don’t you want to marry Caterina?"
Immediately his face hardened. "That is no concern
of yours," he told her dauntingly. "I shall leave you
now to sleep. With any luck the cramp will not return."
In other words, mind your own business, Jodie reflected
ruefully as she watched him leave.